Was Knute Rockne pronounced dead once and for all on that Saturday morning in the Libertyville High School cafeteria 16 months ago?
When then-Wildcats varsity football coach Dale Christensen made his admittedly ill-considered decision to stage his own fake shooting to rouse his troops before a key state playoff game, were the two pops that came out of the borrowed starter’s pistol truly the shots heard round the prep athletic world, signaling the end of old-style motivational techniques in interscholastic sports?
And now, more than one full academic year after L’Affaire Christensen, a central question still rings around the athletic fields, gymnasiums and fieldhouses of Lake County high schools: How should coaches of the ’90s motivate their young athletes?
As with so many things academic, particularly those that delve into the psycho-motivational aspects of contemporary education, the answer depends on whom you ask, be it anyone from prep sports through the pros.
“The minute kids sense that your motivation is contrived in the least bit, it immediately leads to steadily diminishing returns,” said Rob Pelinka, the one-time Lake Forest High School basketball stalwart who later went on to play on three NCAA Final Four teams at the University of Michigan and is now in his second year of law school in Ann Arbor.
“A lot of yelling, a lot of prompting, excessive pressure, all of those are only short-term solutions,” added former Chicago Bulls head coach Doug Collins. Collins’ son Chris, now at Duke University, was Illinois’ prep “Mr. Basketball” at Glenbrook North in Northbrook in 1992, and his daughter Kelly stars on the Spartans’ girls varsity cage team.
“The best athletes motivate themselves,” said 16-year-old Katie Eiserman, one of the anchors of the 1994-95 Lake Forest varsity girls volleyball team.
“No coach ever won a football game on a Saturday afternoon because of something incredibly brilliant he said in the locker room before the kickoff that day,” according to Bulls strength and conditioning consultant Al Vermeil, himself once a successful prep coach in California and the brother of Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl XV boss Dick Vermeil.
So has Coach Buzzcut given way to Coach Tao? Is the Gipper gone?
“A good high school coach today is light-years removed in most respects from his predecessors 30 years ago,” said Ray Roy, now a Highland Park High School coach who has overseen area soccer, gymnastics and volleyball programs. “The primary reason for the change is that, genetically, kids today may be the same, but there has been a perceptible change in their basic values. A different generation of parents is raising a different generation of kids. There’s greater technology available to improve athletic performances, and there is no question that the all-pervasive influence of the media has an enormous effect on kids today. They are brighter, more perceptive.”
“I don’t know if I necessarily agree with `brighter,’ but I will say that student-athletes today are probably braver than we were at their age 25 years ago,” said Chris Eiserman, the boys and girls varsity volleyball coach at Lake Forest and mother of Katie Eiserman. “I see kids who see something new, consider if it would potentially be a positive in their lives and then work to experience it. The mere fact of their heightened determination, to me, is a positive.”
Added Harvey Catchings, an 11-year veteran of the National Basketball Association with Philadelphia and Milwaukee and the father of Stevenson High School’s girls basketball superstars Tauja and Tamika in Lincolnshire: “I don’t agree that kids are brighter today, but their choices, especially the vast spectrum of their media choices, certainly give them a lot more influences. When I was a kid in Jackson, Miss., we had four little local TV stations to pick from each night. Now it’s like hundreds. It makes kids more sophisticated a lot sooner.”
“And kids are much more inclined to speak today,” Collins said. “When I was a teenager, the coach’s words were sacred. Today that’s laughable. We would have never, ever thought of talking back to a coach or even just about any elder for that matter.”
Two starting points on the avenue of understanding must be built between coach and athlete if a successful high school sports dialogue is to be maintained today, according to Dr. Jim Vicory, a sports psychotherapist who is also the co-founder of Sports Potential in Naperville. “First, I insist that there must be mutual respect between player and coach,” he s aid. “And second, I say turn things over to the kids as quickly as possible. Let them make as many decisions impacting upon the team and their individual performance as quickly as possible. You will be amazed at how they welcome the responsibility and the confidence that the coach is placing in their judgment. It is essentially the player-as-partner approach.”
Motivation and confidence should be goals of a good sports program rather than building blocks, according to Vicory. “Knute Rockne-ing is dead,” Vicory insisted. “The day of the autocrat, however charismatic, is long gone. There is, very briefly, an autocratic role to be played by a coach during the start-up phase of a team’s season, when basic rules and goals must be discussed and set. Then, the only time after that start-up when the role of the coach-as-autocrat need be revisited during a season is during a time of crisis, when a snap decision during a contest must be made, like whether to go for a field goal or first down on fourth down. Other than that, I say let the rope out as absolutely far as possible for adolescent athletes today.”
Still, the coach must receive, although not necessarily command, respect from his charges these days, according to Chicago Bears head coach Dave Wannstedt, whose daughters Keri and Jami are also in the extracurricular athletic program at Lake Forest High School.
“At any level, a coach today will get respect when his players realize two things,” Wannstedt said. “One is that you, the coach, know what you are talking about, and two is that if the individual athlete does what he or she is told to do within your system and does it well, they will achieve the success and betterment they’re trying to, be it an individual or team sport. All of a coach’s credibility is predicated upon honesty, and much of his success is predicated upon mutual respect between him and his players.”
“Honesty and respect,” agreed Libertyville varsity basketball coach Max Sanders. “Those are the two things a coach must have today to succeed. But kids today don’t give respect; it must be earned. You earn it by letting them know that you care about them and that you will always be upfront with them. Respect used to be automatic, but those days are long gone. Yet kids are still kids in a lot of respects, one of the most important being that they respond to positive feedback, whatever the endeavor.”
How can a coach today establish credibility with his or her increasingly sophisticated-and some might say downright suspicious-high school athletes?
“In a phrase, I think that you can best foster the sort of honesty that leads to enduring credibility by `serving’ the athlete,” said Pelinka, a former Rhodes Scholarship finalist who has given motivational speeches to more than 400,000 adolescents since graduating from Michigan in 1993.
“Give them a ride home on a cold night, stay around after a regular practice to field balls when they stay after to work on their jump shot, offer to give an extra read to an important paper they have due in a class. Do something that taps into their individuality and shows your concern and that you’re interested in their betterment.”
Highland Park’s Roy thinks that the major reason today’s student-athletes demand such a high standard of honesty from their coaches is because they are so keenly self-critical.
“I have all of my kids in all three of my sports rate themselves on paper, and then we talk it out,” said Roy, the brother of longtime Chicago professional soccer wunderkind Willy Roy. “Kids in general are very honest, and brutally honest with themselves when it comes to their performance in athletics, almost to the point that I think some are far too self-critical. It can get to the point where they almost turn themselves off on participation in a sport.”
Lake Forest’s Eiserman, a parent and a coach, also detects a trend toward unrealistic expectations by high school athletes and resulting negative consequences.
“That’s one thing that I find especially troubling, and we seem to see far too much of it on the North Shore,” she said. “The whole syndrome is that it doesn’t always seem good enough trying to be the best that you can be. Too often, if you’re anything less than an all-stater, regardless of the sport, the student-athlete refuses to accept it as enough and refuses to accept all due credit for commendable effort and improvement.
“Kids raise their own bar too high, they become unrealistic,” she said. “They overlook the enormous benefits which can accrue to them via athletics even if they’re not the next Michael Jordan.”
